God wanted His people to stay and trust Him to protect them; they wanted to run to the 'safety' of Egypt to escape the threat of suffering and death at the hands of the Baylonians (Jeremiah 41:17, 42:7-17). They had already made up their minds to go to Egypt but they decided to ask the prophet Jeremiah to find out what God had to say about it anyway (Jer 42:2). They learned that if they decided to ignore God's advice and pressed on for Egypt, the outcome would be catastrophic. They went anyway. You can read in Jeremiah 43 and 44 how that turned out for them.
Sounds foolish doesn't it? But don't we do the same thing? Life gets hard, conditions get dicey and we stand at a crossroad. We can obey God as best we understand His word or we can go our own way.
Our way might look really good while God's way makes no sense at all so we choose 'Egypt'. It might even work out for a while; seem like the right decision. But eventually we will clearly see that we would have been much better off if we had obeyed God. What a painful lesson that can be!
Hebrews 4:8 says, "Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts." We stand at that crossroad every day where we have to choose to obey God or go to Egypt. God will never mislead you no matter how much better Egypt seems to look. How will you choose today?
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